Database Solutions

LENOVO DATABASE SOLUTIONS

Lenovo Database Solutions for Microsoft SQL

The rapid growth of technology means the ability to collect vast amounts of data and support high rate online transactions. As the volume and velocity of data increases, extracting meaningful insight in a timely manner or supporting online transactions has become more complex. Opportunities are being missed and effort is being wasted. To compete, businesses in the 21st century are demanding the tools to derive true value from their data.

The below Lenovo Database Solutions for Microsoft® SQL Server® bring together the right mix of technology and software to align with a range of data warehouse and transactional database use cases. The configurations integrate a variety of Lenovo Systems and appliances, robust Lenovo Storage options and the capabilities of Microsoft SQL Server 2016/2017 Enterprise and Standard Editions to provide the following benefits:

Improved time to value with pretested hardware configurations

Optimized SQL server deployment with a significant reduction in hardware testing and tuning

Reduced total cost of ownership through better price and performance, rapid deployment, and advanced hardware

Consolidated storage and matched IT investment-to-information-value with several high performance storage options

Microsoft SQL TCO Study

A Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) study providing a quantitative assessment of Microsoft SQL solutions from Lenovo was recently conducted by Cabot Partners, an IT analyst firm focusing on emerging computing technologies. The economic benefit of Data Warehousing and Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) databases using Microsoft SQL Server is large. This paper focuses on the cost and value drivers for Microsoft SQL Server based offerings and how Lenovo solutions provide added value when compared with other options available in the market.

Lenovo Database Benchmarks

The Microsoft SQL DWFT configurations utilize parts of TPC-H benchmark testing from tpc.org to assess platform performance. The results for these TPC-H benchmark tests for Lenovo database configurations for Microsoft SQL have been published:

Lenovo becomes the first company to publish a non-clustered TPC-H@30,000GB benchmark performance result.

Published May 1, 2016

Lenovo Database Configuration for Microsoft SQL Server DWFT– 9 TB

This version of the Lenovo Database Configuration for Microsoft SQL Server DWFT portfolio uses the cost-effective 1U System ThinkSystem SR630 server that is combined with Lenovo PM863a Enterprise Entry SATA SSDs to address data warehouse requirements up to 9 TB in capacity. With this solution Lenovo is the industry’s first company offering a Microsoft certified database solution featuring Microsoft SQL Server 2017 Standard Edition software.

Lenovo Database Configuration for Microsoft SQL Server DWFT – 44 TB

This version of the Lenovo Database Configuration for Microsoft SQL Server DWFT uses the high performance 2U Lenovo ThinkSystem SR650 server to support data warehouse requirements up to 44 TB in capacity. With this solution Lenovo is the industry’s first company offering a Microsoft certified database solution featuring Microsoft SQL Server 2017 Enterprise Edition software.

Lenovo Database Configuration for Microsoft SQL Server DWFT – 50 TB

Lenovo offers a Microsoft SQL Server DWFT solution featuring the highly available Lenovo ThinkSystem SN550 compute node deployed in the Lenovo Flex System Enterprise chassis. For storage, this solution also features the Lenovo ThinkSystem DS6200 SAN which is designed for I/O intensive applications. Enabled with Microsoft SQL Server 2017, this solution improves time-to-value for data warehouse analytics applications with a scalable architecture.

Through the Intel Select Solution program, Lenovo offers a growing portfolio of high availability Microsoft SQL Server OLTP solutions featuring the robust ThinkSystem SR630 and SR650 servers. These transactional database offerings combine high-performance and cost effective server platforms with Microsoft SQL Server software. These solutions are based on the Intel Select Solution specifications and performance results have been verified by Intel. To deliver the uptime performance businesses demand in today’s competitive operational environment, these solutions are deployed in two server high availability configurations.

Key benefits of investing in an Intel Select Solution from Lenovo include:

Fast and easy deployment. With pre-defined settings and rigorous system-wide tuning, Intel Select Solutions are designed to increase efficiency in the IT testing process, speed time to service delivery, and increase confidence in solution performance.

Workload-optimized performance. The Intel Select Solution configurations offered by Lenovo are jointly designed by Lenovo and Intel to deliver performance at a specified workload threshold and are built on the latest Intel architecture foundations.

Lenovo Database Configuration for Microsoft SQL Server OLTP on Flex System with DS6200

Lenovo offers a Microsoft SQL Server OLTP solution featuring the highly available Lenovo ThinkSystem SN550 compute node deployed in the Lenovo Flex System Enterprise chassis. For storage, this solution also features the Lenovo ThinkSystem DS6200 SAN which is designed for I/O intensive applications. Enabled with Microsoft SQL Server 2016, this solution improves time-to-value for transactional needs with a new scalable architecture to solve SQL database transactional needs up to 50,000 batch requests per second.

Based upon the Lenovo ThinkSystem platform, this solution features the latest generation of SSDs to provide high IOPs, low latency and high storage capacity for virtualized Microsoft SQL Server databases. Virtualization of databases using VMware ESXi hypervisors and vSAN storage enables the creation more database instances on a single platform and with a higher density level than otherwise possible, thus reducing the required number of servers. This tested and advanced configuration leverages the high performance capabilities of the Lenovo ThinkSystem SR650 and SR630 servers for database computing and in-server virtual storage providing:

The Lenovo ThinkAgile SX for Microsoft Azure Stack appliance delivers a pre-integrated, easy-to-deploy rack-level solution for hybrid clouds to dramatically reduce time-to-value and total cost of ownership (TCO). This appliance is based on Lenovo industry-leading data center hardware and Microsoft Azure Stack which is an extension of Microsoft Azure Services to on-premise environments. This solution addresses the deployment of a Microsoft SQL Server OLTP workload on the Lenovo ThinkAgile SXM appliance. It’s the perfect platform to:

Deliver Azure cloud services from the security of your own data center

Enable rapid development and iteration of applications with on-premises deployment tools to help transform your organization

Lenovo HP Config for Oracle DB

Oracle users want reliability without sacrificing performance or increasing cost. Many of the high-performance solutions available today are cost-prohibitive to acquire and complex to maintain. The Lenovo High Performance Configuration for Oracle Database 12c delivers a simple and affordable solution that satisfies the requirements of demanding Oracle users. The Lenovo x3650 M5 server with Fusion ioMemory SX350 storage cards provides a reliable, high-performance solution for running Oracle workloads that efficiently use system resources to help drive down total cost of ownership.

Lenovo has created a whitepaper that addresses a set of deployable solutions for accelerating various Oracle Database workloads with SanDisk PCIe based flash storage while simultaneously reducing TCO. Two database workloads are examined in this paper: An On-Line Transaction Processing (OLTP) workload, and a Decision Support System (DSS) workload. As shown in this whitepaper, using SanDisk PCIe based flash storage all but eliminates the processor’s spin-wait events and allows the system as a whole to perform significantly more operations per unit of time. Additionally, this whitepaper

Examines how to reduce TCO by running Oracle workloads more efficiently

Lenovo Scale Up Config for Oracle DB

Oracle Database software products support both scale-up and scale-out computing. However, deploying Oracle Databases on scale-up servers offers a number of benefits, including reduced server licensing costs. When scaling-up, Oracle Real Application Cluster (RAC) is not required. Another benefit is machine resources (especially CPUs) are instantly available for sharing. Deploying a scale-up architecture enables data center administrators to add resources to existing servers without requiring them to rewrite applications to harness the additional compute power. For large databases, scale-up architectures can provide higher levels of performance than those afforded by large numbers of scale-out distributed databases.

Lenovo has created a configuration guide that addresses a Lenovo scale-up database configuration. It describes a validated reference configuration to successfully implement Oracle Database 12c running on Oracle Linux 7.2 and Oracle Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel (UEK), all hosted on a clustered pair of Lenovo System x3950 X6 servers. This configuration is intended for enterprise-level businesses with scaled-up, converged infrastructures, in which cost-effectiveness and productivity are a must. This guide addresses many benefits of this architecture, including:

Reduced software licensing costs: With many software packages licensed on a per-processor or per-core basis, reducing the number of systems can significantly lower software support costs.

Improved IT staff productivity: Scale-up servers reduce the total number of processors and servers being managed. With fewer physical servers, and the added automation and manageability features, administrators’ work is less cumbersome.

Reduced end-user productivity losses: Scale-up servers with mission-critical RAS capabilities (such as the System x3850 X6 and the System x3950 X6) incur less unplanned downtime than do scale-out servers.

Accelerated application deployment: With virtualized scale-up servers, you can accelerate application deployment. Projects that previously took weeks to size, purchase, install and configure, can now be ready in hours.

MongoDB Database Solutions

With the exponential growth of data from multiple new sources - for example, mobile, social, and web – new tools and technologies are needed to gather, analyze and visualize data in order to extract powerful insights from this data. In addition
to traditional structured data optimized for relational database management systems, these new sources of data are typically unstructured or semi-structured, meaning that schemas to harness the data must be flexible, distributed for horizontal scaling,
and on preferably low-cost industry-standard servers.